MUNICH -- The German court trying John Demjanjuk heard statements made
to Soviet authorities by a now-deceased guard at the Nazis’ Sobibor
death camp who apparently said he remembered Demjanjuk serving there.

The 90-year-old Demjanjuk is standing trial on 28,060 counts of
accessory to murder on allegations he was a guard at the camp in
occupied Poland. He denies ever having been a guard anywhere.

Defense lawyer Ulrich Busch argued that the court shouldn’t read
summaries of statements by Sobibor guard Ignat Danilchenko, who
allegedly told Soviet officials in the 1970s that he remembered
Demjanjuk from Sobibor.

Busch said the statements may have been extracted through torture and
noted that Danilchenko was not alive to be cross examined.

Trial judges rejected his motions, saying they would read the evidence
into the record before deciding on its credibility.

German historian Dieter Pohl, who testified earlier in the Demjanjuk
trial, urged the court to treat the Danilchenko statements with the
"highest caution" because of their source. He testified that it
appeared Danilchenko was telling the interrogators what they wanted to
hear.

[W.Z. The Ukrainian dissident, Danylo Shumuk,
was dragooned into the Red Army, captured by the Germans, escaped,
joined and fought with the UPA for Ukraine's independence, captured by
the NKVD and subsequently served 42 years in the Soviet Gulags and
exile before being allowed to join his relatives in Canada on
23May1987. When questioned by my late wife, Lily, as to how he
withstood the tortures of the NKVD, he related how the Ukrainian
dissidents developed a technique in which they would confess to an
imaginary charge to end the torture, but were careful not to implicated
any other acquaintances. They would make statements and give
descriptions of people, which satisfied the interrogators but were
impossible to corroberate via later investigations. Danilchenko's
testimony seems to fall into this category.]

In the statements read to the Munich state court Tuesday, Danilchenko
-- a captured Red Army soldier -- said that he and other Ukrainians
taken in 1942 to the Trawniki training camp were told that they would
be collaborating with the German army.

Danilchenko told his Soviet interrogators that he were instructed how
to use weapons and was sent several times to patrol at a nearby camp
for Jewish prisoners, according to the statements. He said he was later
sent to Sobibor and to Flossenbuerg, a concentration camp in Germany.

Judges plan to continue reading the statements at the next trial
session on Oct. 5, 2010. Demjanjuk wasn’t mentioned in the sections read
Tuesday.

However, transcripts already available show he told Soviet officials in
1979 that he served with Demjanjuk at Sobibor and that Demjanjuk "like
all guards in the camp, participated in the mass killing of Jews."

U.S. investigators have in the past questioned the validity of
Danilchenko’s statements, saying that they contain numerous factual
errors.

[W.Z. But
the OSI prosecutors withheld the Danilchenko Protocols from the court
and the defence during the 1901 denaturalization trial, the 1986
extradition hearings and, presumably, from the 1987 Jerusalem Trial.
For the 2009 Munich Trial, it is interesting that the OSI released a
Trawniki ID card, 1016-Daniltschenko, that was written on an English-language typewriter, on a different printed form (type S) and erroneous official seals (type BB).]

The prosecution argues that after the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, a
Soviet Red Army soldier, was captured by the Germans in 1942 he agreed
to serve under the SS as a guard.

Demjanjuk claims he spent most of the rest of the war in Nazi camps for
prisoners of war before joining the so-called Vlasov Army of
anti-communist Soviet POWs and others. That army was formed to fight
with the Germans against the encroaching Soviets in the final months of
the war.